In her essay ‘Notes on Thought and Vision’ (1919), H.D. asserts her belief that a small community of individuals, ‘gathered together in the name of truth [and] beauty’, could change the world: ‘Two or three people, with healthy bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought.’ H.D.'s work suggests that she saw herself as a member of this group and believed in the revolutionary potential of poetry. In two of her major poetic works, Hymen and Trilogy, this belief is reflected in her revisionary portraits of women that challenge heteropatriarchy. While Trilogy (1944–6) is H.D.'s most discussed and highly regarded poem, Hymen (1921), her first substantial collection after the First World War, has received relatively little critical attention. Although Hymen shares with H.D.'s first collection, Sea Garden (1916), an interest in Greek Classicism, it signifies a distinct shift from the early work that established her as a poet and cemented her reputation as ‘H.D. Imagiste’. Most importantly, Hymen moves away from a focus on flowers and landscape to offer the first fully realised example of the emphatically woman-centred poetry for which H.D. has become known: its free-verse lyric poems are preoccupied with revising patriarchal images of women. Thus, in terms of both content and technique, Hymen is an important precursor to Trilogy, an epic poem that offers a spiritual response to war principally through the recuperation of biblical women, particularly Mary Magdalene. Together, these two texts exemplify H.D.’s poetic strategies and explore her main concerns: female identity and the impact of war on the modern world.

The idea and practice of translation is central to H.D.'s writing and selfconception throughout her career. Her first efforts as a poet were translations from Heine and Theocritus; her first poems (1913) were translations from the Greek Anthology; her first published monograph was a translation, Choruses from the Iphigeneia in Aulis of Euripides (1916). This pamphlet and later ‘choruses’ from the Hippolytus (1919) were published in the Poets' Translation Series, which she helped her husband Richard Aldington to edit between 1915 and 1919. Early efforts culminated in Collected Poems (1925) with about ten lyric poems incorporating original translation, translated ‘choruses’ from Euripides, and a translation of the opening lines of the Odyssey. Throughout the 1920s she wrote a series of essays on Greek writers and two historical narratives that incorporate translation from Greek. Her experiments continued with Hippolytus Temporizes (1927), an original play in close dialogue with Euripides' drama; with translations of other Euripidean choruses in Red Roses for Bronze (1931); and with her only translation of a complete play, Euripides' Ion, Translated with Notes (1937). Even at the very end of her career, after completion of Helen in Egypt, H.D. in a late diary (1955) was contemplating further translations of Euripides, which she apparently never initiated.

Moreover, H.D. clearly imagined herself as translator, perhaps as much as poet. In autobiographical fictions – especially ‘Hipparchia’ in Palimpsest (1926) and Bid Me to Live (1960) – she figures herself as a translator of classical poetry, an activity that in these narratives seems almost indistinguishable from original composition. Hipparchia in her translation is inspired, in an ecstatic state of ‘intellectual sensuality’, catching ‘authentic metre [written] in the air’ (pp. 77, 79); and the detailed reflection on the process of translation in Bid Me to Live (pp. 163–4) is perhaps the clearest statement of H.D.’s early poetics.